What the Romney and McCain Campaigns Have in Common

Our John observes in the thread (from Texas) that nobody he knows is actually voting for Romney. That’s not as true for me, but it is true that nobody I know in the “persuadable” category is doing so. In this respect, Mitt’s campaign is starting to remind us all more and more of McCain’s. Actually, McCain this time would at least be able to take it to Obama on the collapse of his foreign policy.

No, he wouldn’t, and there are a few reasons why. McCain’s hawkish foreign policy views mean that when he differs with Obama he is consistently wrong, and he is also likely to be on the wrong side of public opinion as well. He would face the same political obstacles that Romney does, but would insist on talking about foreign policy even though it would make his election even less likely. In that respect, McCain would be an even more oblivious candidate than Romney has been. McCain has virtually all of the same misguided foreign policy views as Romney, but like Romney he has few meaningful disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy decisions. Like Romney, he would be compelled to make opportunistic and misleading attacks on Obama’s positions, and would harp on endlessly about appeasement that has never happened. McCain would represent even greater continuity with Bush-era foreign policy, since he was a leading cheerleader for it in Congress, and it would be even easier to hang Bush’s failures around McCain’s neck.

Also like Romney, McCain was not opposed to the Libyan war, and as far as I know he never once suggested that there should be any sort of stabilization force in the country after the fall of the old regime*. If Obama erred by choosing to intervene in Libya, as I believe he did, McCain was in even greater error, since he would have insisted on intervening even sooner with less international support. Any criticism McCain might want to make about the situation in Libya after the war is therefore largely opportunistic and hard to take seriously, and the same would be true if he were the nominee this year.

Romney’s campaign is flailing and performing slightly worse than McCain was at this point four years ago. One thing that the two campaigns have in common is that both candidates made high-profile displays of their bad judgment and ineptitude in areas where they were admittedly at their weakest. Unfortunately for them, these happened to be foreign policy for Romney and the economy for McCain. Whatever their other qualifications, these moments showed that they were not prepared for the Presidency. If the McCain campaign was sometimes faulted for having been too passive and not being willing to criticize Obama directly, the Romney campaign has had almost the exact opposite problem. It attacks even when it has nothing to say, and in order to launch those attacks it often makes things up that never happened so that there will be something to criticize. The idea that the Romney campaign is failing because it has been insufficiently aggressive in criticizing Obama may be comforting, but it is very much mistaken. If few people are voting for Romney, it’s probably because the Romney campaign and the party it represents are running on (mostly) nothing.

* That isn’t to say that putting a U.S. or NATO stabilization force in Libya would have been wise. The soldiers deployed in Libya for post-conflict stabilization likely would have come under attack on a regular basis, and the low-cost (to the U.S.) Libyan intervention would have turned into an ongoing conflict with American casualties. Incredibly, one of Romney’s top advisers implied last week that this is what should have been done.

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19 Responses to What the Romney and McCain Campaigns Have in Common

What was obvious along, but never really questioned as far as I can in any meaningful way during the 2008 and 2012 primaries was that Romney is, by far, the least experienced politician to head a major party ticket. He only won elective office once running against a broke candidate, and, had he run for re-election as Governor of Massachusetts, he would have been crushed (his approval rating was 34% in November 2006 as his term ended). Plus, let’s face it, it wasn’t as if he was seriously tested in 2012 and in 2008 he couldn’t defeat a hobbled McCain campaign. All this was kind of obvious.

Running for President is hard, only 44 people have done it successfully. I’m not sure what is all that surprising that an ill-experienced and ill-tested politician is doing poorly on the biggest stage in politics.

I just read about this about Romney’s VP Math Wiz and Master of All That is Financial Ryan (this was buried behind Romney’s tax returns (source: NY TImes),

“In an amended return also released Friday, Representative Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Romney’s running mate, disclosed that he and his wife had initially failed to report $61,122 in income from 2011. He said the failure was inadvertent. The change raised their total income to $323,416 and increased their taxes by $19,917 to $64,674, or 20 percent of adjusted gross income.”

Running for President is hard, only 44 people have done it successfully.
Point taken, but like a huge rock-paper-scissors tournament, somebody is going to win. I have also commented on how Romney’s scant political experience has been a non-issue. For someone who has spent so much time running for office – hell, he’s got six years of experience running for president – he seems strangely out of his depth.

“Our John observes in the thread (from Texas) that nobody he knows is actually voting for Romney. That’s not as true for me, but it is true that nobody I know in the “persuadable” category is doing so.”

Actually, that is not true. I am one of those “persuadable” voters. The only thing that would persuade me to vote for Mitt Romney is if he pledged to name Ron Paul to replace Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the FED. I wonder if there enough others like me to turn this election in his favor?

Mr. Dalton, how does the fact that you are a persuadable voter who will not be voting for Mitt Romney unless he does something he will almost certainly not do prove that persuadable voters will not be voting for Mitt Romney? Many persuadable voters would vote for Mitt Romney if Mitt Romney did things completely uncharacteristic of Mitt Romney, but that’s not the case.

“The only thing that would persuade me to vote for Mitt Romney is if he pledged to name Ron Paul to replace Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the FED.”

To do what? Shut it down? I have been a Ron Paul supporter for a few years and remain a supporter of everything Ron Paul stands for. I was an establishment Republican. I voted for dumb McCain in the dumb 2008 primary and the election! Learned my lesson.

But, even if Mitt Romney had picked Ron Paul as his VP choice (which would NEVER happen), I wouldn’t vote for Mr. Romney. I would NEVER vote for Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan (no matter how the establishment ridiculously tries to portray Mr. Ryan as a “libertarian”). No way. No how. No thanks.

Romney probably won’t win the election, but he will easily outdo McCain’s performance in 2008.

McCain won 45.7% of the popular vote, carried 22 states, and earned 173 electoral votes. Romney will win at least 47% of the popular vote, carry at least 24 states (every state McCain won, plus Indiana and North Carolina), and win at least 199 EVs. That’s the minimum baseline for Romney’s performance this year. He will most like do slightly better.

This has nothing to do with the virtues of Romney’s campaign over McCain’s four years ago. Romney is an uninspiring and unimaginative politician. I really have no idea what he would do as president because I don’t sense any other goal in him other than to be president. His vague governing philosophy strikes me as being generically Republican, but not something he holds to with any earnestness. I don’t think there is any issue he would truly fight for. He’s running on a resume, not a program.

But as Henry Adams once put, politics is the systematic organization of hatreds. In accordance with this rule, Romney supporters are driven by fear of Obama, not love of Romney. They don’t want Obamacare to survive. They don’t want what is likely to be two more liberal justices on the Supreme Court. They don’t want a nuclear-armed Iran. So they support a man they don’t really care for that much. Romney’s sole virtue is that he’s not Obama, and that one virtue will be enough to earn him at least 47% of the popular vote.

The best recent comparison for this is not the 2008 election between Obama and McCain, but the 2004 election between Bush and Kerry. That year, Democrats rallied around a candidate they settled on in order to defeat an incumbent president they hated.

John Kerry was probably no Democrat’s first choice for taking on Bush. But a lack of solid alternatives opened the way for his nomination. The bipartisan support for the Iraq War in 2002 made too many Democrats (including Kerry) vulnerable in the general election. Despite this, Democratic partisans overwhelmingly rallied to Kerry’s candidacy because of their hatred for Bush. Turnout was high. Support for Ralph Nader and the Green Party was low. Kerry came very close to winning the presidency. If 70,000 votes had switched from Bush to him in Ohio, he would have been president.

Like Kerry, Romney was almost no Republican’s first choice to run against Obama this year. The party settled on him because the Bush years had decimated most of the better alternatives. They settled on him because Romney is a safe candidate. He lacks an ideological edge. He has a fine resume. He had run for the presidency before and thus already been vetted by the media. No serious scandal tainted his past. Many people dislike Romney and no one outside of his family and friends loves him, but he scares almost no one who isn’t a committed partisan. He’s a blah candidate.

Like Kerry in 2004, Romney has an issue that he must simultaneously run hard against even as he justifies his own previous support for it. For Kerry, that was the Iraq War; For Romney, it is Obamacare.

Like Kerry, Romney lacks the common touch. The stories about both men’s diffidence and awkwardness in common social settings is legendary. Mark Steyn has a hilarious story about Kerry walking through a room of cheering supporters in 2004 only to go straight to the restroom as the large and now-confused throng stood outside the door awaiting his return.

There are differences between the two men. For example, Kerry’s history of positions on the issues was more representative of his party’s ideology than is Romney’s. But there are many striking similarities between the two candidates and the elections of 2004 and 2008. For this reason, some of you should take Romney’s bid more seriously than you do. If you think Obama has this election in the bag, and is likely to put up the same kind of margins this year as he did in 2008 against McCain, you are in deep denial.

pincher,
while i think many may agree about Romney and Kerry as far as not being as personable, the story of walking past people to take a leak isn’t exactly a good depiction. if he has to go, he HAS to go, not really up for a ‘discussion’ at that point. i’m sure he held off as he could, but then had to go. can’t fault a guy for taking a leak.

But seriously, are there so few restrooms at campaign stops in America that Kerry had to use the facility located in the middle of a cheering throng? And not even leave them with a joke before disappearing to take of business?

scottinnj: Running for President is hard, only 44 people have done it successfully.

Josh: Not that it matters much, but only 43 people have done it successfully– Grover Cleveland is counted twice.

Actually, it’s even worse than that: Although there are 44 presidents, I think only 41 people have run successfully for the office — Cleveland counts twice, and Gerald Ford and Andrew Johnson never successfully ran for president.

“Obama not being Bush redux (at least not during the 2008 campaign) may not have been O’s sole virtue in ’08, but it sure was up there.”

Yes, it was. After eight years of Bush, the country was primed for a Democrat. It could have been Hillary, Obama, Kerry or even Edwards. They all would have won.

But I think Obama had obvious strengths in 2008 that Romney won’t have this year. He was a fresh face on the scene, eloquent, and he had an interesting background. Such things shouldn’t matter, but of course they did. Without them, Obama wouldn’t have defeated Hillary.

McCain was probably the best candidate of the GOP lot in 2008. Not on policy, of course. But just as a retail politician. He performed about as well as any Republican could have under the circumstances. If Romney had been the GOP nominee in 2008, he might have lost by twelve to fifteen points. McCain lost by less than eight.